So we have several new projects at work which we are working on concurrently which is getting quite mental. My favourite of which is our new design for the old Dream Weddings website (which is desperately needed!). So this is the design so far:

One of my favourite things about this site so far is the map on the home page. We have used an SVG so the whole thing is generated by a page of coordinates and styled by CSS. SVGs aren’t compatible with IE so if you look at it in IE then we use an awesome tool to convert it to Flash so it still works! Pretty cool no?

At the time of writing the site is about a month away from completion and will only truly work in Chrome, Safari or Firefox (and maybe Opera), and the other tabs don’t go anywhere at the moment but the map does and you can browse all of the destinations. I have taken off the link to the site as it’s passworded now as it’s obviously been trawled by google and is coming up in searches, but once it’s live I will shout about it on here!

So I have been working as an in-house developer for Miles Morgan Travel for six months now and the experience so far has been pretty great, let me explain.

My previous projects either at university or freelance have been very fleeting, you would work on one project and then let it go for another one that has to take all of your attention, even though it’s not perfect you have no choice but to go on to the next one. With in-house development you get to work on a project, just like any other. It has the same lifecycle, but once that project is finished you know that you can come back to it and carry on development, so when you have a great idea 3 months down the line you can actually go back and implement it. With this potential in the evolution of my projects they become much more meaningful to me and that means that I’m proud of them which makes me work all the more harder on them.

So the main website has been finished for a couple of months now and it would be great if you would take a look at it here. So there have definitely been ups and downs on this project just like any other; the backend admin isn’t very usable, the number of destinations isn’t where we would like it to be, some of the page layouts are basic, but these are problems that we can fix over time.

So maybe the greatest strength of being an in-house developer can also be it’s weakness. We had a deadline for this project and as soon as it was ready we were told to put it live. Now I am a bit of a perfectionist and I didn’t feel like this project was finished, but I didn’t have a choice, and now I am working on other projects it may be a while before we get the chance to come back and implement the next phase, but at least I will get the chance.

Image release was built for Neil Edbrooke, a very talented photographer based in Bristol. This site incorporates a gallery framework called Plogger. It took a lot of time to work out how Plogger worked and edit the code so just the gallery was left, this is because it gives the user an entire page rather than just the picture content that was needed. It has a very easy to use content management system, allowing Neil to upload as many photos as he wants and giving him the ability to edit the size and quality in the admin section.

Research on other photography sites has shown me that many are cluttered by superfluous links that increase the difficulty of navigation. I built Image Release with a very clean design, trying to make the navigation as simple as possible. I believe this enhances the function of the site, as the simplistic design does not interfere with the viewing of the photography. This was reinforced by making the site very dark to make the images and their colours stand out against the background.
The site can be viewed here.